31 Day Comment Challenge: Days 12 – 13by Meredith Farkas

Last week, I examined the comment-friendliness of my posts. Today, I’m supposed to examine the comment-friendliness of the technologies I employ on my blog. Some blogs certainly do put up a lot of hurdles to people wanting to comment. For some reason, on Blogger blogs, I always fail to enter the captcha right the first time. Some blogs even require you to create an account to comment like on Lifehacker.

On my blog, all someone has to do is enter a name and email address. There really isn’t anything else required of commenters. Everything should automatically show up on the blog unless the person entered a certain number of links at which point it gets held for moderation (and I get an email about it so I usually get to it relatively quickly). Every once in a while, Akismet grabs a comment that isn’t spam and throws it into my spam bin, so I check that at least twice a week. I try to use spam prevention technologies that don’t put any burden on the person posting, because I know I’m less likely to post a comment if I have to jump through hoops.

Day 13: Write a Blog Post Using Comments
I actually unintentionally did this activity before I even read about it:

For today’s task, we’re going to write a blog post that responds to comments. This can be a post that summarizes or reflects on comments we’ve received on our own blogs.

The post I wrote on Thursday evening was a reflection on the comments I’d received on my previous post about speaking, compensation and the like. I know that not everyone follows comments on other people’s blogs, and the comments on that original post were so rich and thought-provoking. I wanted to make sure people were aware of the dialogue and also to reflect on my own views regarding the various opinions expressed in the comments.

A lot of the comment stuff in this challenge has focused on our own blogs. This is a place I feel like I’m doing a pretty good job of encouraging conversation. But if anyone has suggestions on how I could make this a better environment for conversation, please do let me know. I love that my blog gets comments and I learn so much from other people’s views, so if there’s something I can do to make it more likely that you’ll comment, I’d love to know about it.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Meredith Farkas

Meredith Farkas is a faculty librarian at Portland Community College in Oregon and an adjunct faculty member at San Jose State University's SLIS program. She is the author of the book “Social Software in Libraries: Building Collaboration, Communication and Community Online” (Information Today, 2007) and writes the monthly column “Technology in Practice” for American Libraries. Meredith was honored in 2014 with the ACRL Instruction Section Innovation Award, in 2008 and 2011 with the WISE Excellence in Online Education Award and in 2009 with the LITA/Library Hi Tech award for Outstanding Communication in Library and Information Technology. She has been writing the blog Information Wants to be Free since 2004.

3 Comments

Meredith it definitely isn’t you with blogger. I’ve been watching the antispam word carefully. I’m entering it properly and it just has plain attitude. Close to 100 % of the time it rejects it. Sarah Stewart’s solution was she has turned off the anti-spam word on her blogger blog and she hasn’t had any problem with spam.